For his podcast interview this month, Inside Croydon columnist Andrew Fisher talks to Peter Geoghegan, the journalist and author behind Democracy For Sale, the Substack newsletter which exposed how senior figures within the Labour government had hired consultants to spy on journalists who had been investigating the lobby group Labour Together, with the intention of discrediting them and their work.
The reports by Geoghegan and Khadija Sharife led to the resignation of former Labour Together chief Josh Simons from his post as parliamentary secretary in the Cabinet Office.
This week, Sharife and Geoghegan were named the 2026 winners of the prestigious Paul Foot Award for investigative journalism.
The award recognises the country’s most brilliant, talented and determined journalists working in the fields of investigative and campaigning journalism.
Inside Croydon has previously reported on the Paul Holden book, The Fraud, and interviewed Holden about how Labour Together, which was co-founded by Croydon MP Steve Reed and his Lambeth Council mate Morgan McSweeney, had failed to declare more than £740,000-worth of donations – money which was used to install Keir Starmer as leader of the Labour Party and, ultimately, as Prime Minister.
In this interview, Fisher talks to Geoghegan about the resignation of Simons, first as a government minister, then as an MP, triggering “probably the most consequential by-election in decades”, in Makerfield later this month.
Now APCO, the agency hired by Labour Together (recently rebranded Think Labour), is under investigation by the PR trade body. Tom Harper, the former Sunday Times journalist who led the Labour Together campaign, has left APCO.
“But the story is not finished,” Geoghegan says. “There are still huge questions about who knew about APCO’s work, including Keir Starmer.
“The black ops PR industry operates without transparency or accountability.”
Read more: The Fraud: how Reed’s Labour spied on Croydon councillors
From 2015 to 2019, Andrew Fisher, pictured right, was the Labour Party’s Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn- Fisher is also the author of The Failed Experiment – and how to build an economy that works, and now writes columns for InsideCroydon, the i newspaper and is a regular pundit on BBC and Sky News programmes
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When Andy Burnham takes over, will he ignore Steve Reed’s misdeeds or cast him out of the Cabinet and into the wilderness of the backbenches? A Manchesterian government that has room for that n’er-do-well will be just the same old Labour party, drifting towards defeat